44.036 - Neoliberalism, Racism, and School Choice Policy in South Africa, Canada, and the United States

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Around the globe, an increasing number of education activists have organized to protest the neoliberal restructuring of public schooling. For activists, organizing for educational justice requires addressing neoliberalism and racism as distinct yet intersecting social forces that shape the remaking of public schooling. In response, education activist and policy scholar Pauline Lipman passionately calls for “education scholarship that illuminates intersecting dynamics of race and class, racism and capitalism, as relatively independent but co-constitutive ordering systems in society” (2015, p. 346). As such, this symposium draws from qualitative research conducted in South Africa, Canada, and the United States to investigate the co-constitutive elements of neoliberalism, racism, and school choice policy.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 4: Social Contexts of Educational Policy and Politics

Chair

• Thomas C. Pedroni, Wayne State University

Papers

• The "Neoliberalizing of Race"? Youths' Experiences of School Choice in a Postcolonial City - Ee-Seul Yoon, University of Manitoba

• School Choice and Low-Income Black Communities in South Africa - Bekisizwe S. Ndimande, The University of Texas - San Antonio

• Euphemizing School Choice Policy: The Neoliberal Remaking of Schools in the Name of Racial Justice - Nicole Nguyen, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Critical geographies of schooling and identity in Detroit: Experiments on the Black body politic - Thomas C. Pedroni, Wayne State University

Discussant

• Kalervo N. Gulson, University of New South Wales